This is one bad case of reporting that will finish up costing someone huge in the law courts…BBC as well as Fairfax in Australia will be at the receiving end of Murdoch’s lawyers. His tweets show he is rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect.

Austar boss John Porter bags AFR piracy claims

Austar United chief executive John Porter has rubbished claims that there was a secret unit in News Corp that promoted a wave of piracy in the 1990s . Picture: Renee Nowytarger Source: Herald Sun

THE chief executive of pay-TV group Austar United has rubbished claims in Fairfax Media’s The Australian Financial Review that a secret unit within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation promoted a wave of piracy in Australia in the 1990s that damaged Austar’s finances.

John Porter, who has led Austar since it launched in 1995, said it was also “completely unjustified” to try to draw a connection between those allegations and the $1.9 billion merger under way between Austar and Foxtel, the latter of which is 25 per cent owned by News Corporation subsidiary News Limited.

“From what I can tell, (the AFR story) is built on a series of 14,000-plus emails that somebody is trying to connect the dots on in a way that, in my opinion, is not legitimate,” he said.

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Mr Murdoch tweeted: “seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels”. He said it was “easy to hit back hard”, which the company was “preparing” to do.

Mr Carey said NDS had waged a war against pay-TV theft and copyright infringement and hit back at the BBC’s Panorama program, which also aired piracy allegations in Britain this week, saying it presented “manipulated and mischaracterised emails to produce unfair and baseless accusations”.

NDS executive chairman Abe Peled said the Panorama program, which Chenoweth helped produce, manipulated emails to make them appear to be correspondence generated by NDS when they had been forwarded emails sent to the company.

“To the contrary, in its original form, this exchange is clear evidence of NDS’s ongoing anti-piracy activities.”

An NDS spokeswoman confirmed a similar letter is now being drafted by NDS lawyers for the AFR, demanding a retraction.

Mr Peled added that allegations had previously been tested in the US justice system, with the Department of Justice, a federal court jury and a federal appellate court all clearing NDS.

In an email to News Limited’s 10,000 Australian employees yesterday, Mr Williams said the reports were “highly misleading” and urged employees to “consider the motives behind these stories”. News Limited is the publisher of The Australian.

The AFR is uploading to its website more than 14,000 emails it said were recovered from a laptop used by the former European chief of the NDS division Operational Security, who worked for the company between 1996 and 2002.

In a statement, NDS said the emails referred to in the AFR story were submitted in an earlier US court case and NDS had been cleared of any wrongdoing.

It said the emails from a stolen hard drive were submitted as evidence “during that trial and considered by the court that vindicated NDS”.

News said claims the operational security unit reported to the office of Mr Murdoch were “categorically untrue”.

AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury yesterday stood by the newspaper’s reports and said some of the emails had not been tendered in the US court cases.

Austar initially said it had not been contacted by the AFR before the reports were published. However, it later corrected this and said that a spokesperson had been contacted but had declined to comment.

Mr Porter said that hackers had cracked Austar’s system in 2001 and at that time pirate users accounted for about 5 per cent of its 350,000 subscribers.

“We realised we did have a problem — as did Foxtel — and it took approximately a year and a half to fix it,” he said.

“But it wasn’t material from a financial standpoint.

“It’s the nature of our business that people try to crack our encryption systems.

“We’re constantly trying to stay one step ahead — people at NDS would know that’s the way the system works.

“So for them to hack our system for some commercial advantage — no one in the industry would contemplate that as a tactic, legitimate or otherwise.

“We’ve had over 150 prosecutions for piracy that we’ve been involved with at both state and federal level. We’ve never, ever heard of any involvement by NDS or anyone else for that matter.”

The AFR also alleged that NDS’s activities “assisted News to bid for pay TV businesses at reduced prices including . . . Austar”.

“Somebody’s trying to draw that story but there is no factual connection,” Mr Porter said.

“Foxtel was as damaged as Austar was by piracy in the early days of pay TV. The fact is, neither of us has had our system meaningfully hacked in over a decade so it’s a story that is completely irrelevant to whatever transaction is happening today.”

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, which is currently examining Foxtel’s takeover bid for the regional pay TV operator, said it had no comment to make on the allegations.

Mr Porter said the Austar shareholder vote on the bid would go ahead as scheduled today.

“There is no reason for the ACCC to even contemplate this story,” he said.

“I don’t think they believe it’s relevant at all, either, and they’re sticking to the process that is under way.

“They’re very busy administering the Trade Practices Act and not worrying about speculation in the media about events that happened 13 years ago.”

THE Australian Financial Review’s claimed expose of pay-TV piracy by a “secret unit” of NewsCorp is a total and embarrassing crock.

It was an exercise in breathless and repetitive – endlessly, endlessly repetitive – sliming that lacked even the most minimal requisite slime, and which damned only one organisation. The AFR and Fairfax Media.

What’s more, even more self-damningly, the AFR admitted as much on its own front page, that it had a crock, on the very same day as it was launching its saturation slimage last Wednesday.

It made the tell-tale admission in a way that should be – that should have been – obvious to any journalist of even the meanest intelligence, even after consuming the requisite diet of ABC-Fairfax anti-NewsCorp Kool-Aid.

23 Responses to More Murdoch crimes revealed

Hi Tom, what proof if any is there that mega-crook Murdoch is right in this? He should have been jailed long ago, just for the Milly Dowler hacking, not even talking about Murdoch’s thousands of other phone hacking cases. Only his bribes to police and politicians so far have kept Murdoch out of jail.

This topic has nothing to do with the hacking, and the details on the other business are not out there yet, but 13 years difference in time does not seem to have anything to do with what he is accused of…this is just his enemies still out to get him, let’s wait and see what happens before jumping to conclusions, unlike the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, and extreme leftist, Fairfax. If there was proof of anything more, he would be jailed for hacking…but I prefer to defer to those doing the investigating.

Sorry, but your reaction to me looks somewhat incoherent. I will just deal with some points.

“This topic has nothing to do with the hacking”. Yes, it does, as it makes for a more complete picture of the Murdoch empire as an empire of crime, after the earlier Milly Dowler and other phone hacking revelations, the revelations about bribing police and politicians, etc. Murdoch’s lying propaganda for the Iraq and Afgjhanistan wars, and his propaganda for an Iran war now, also fit in this picture (The BBC is indeed sometimes “biased” , in the sense of pro-Iraq and Afghanistan etc. wars; like the Murdoch media, though mainly with a slightly less hysterical tone).

The Fairfax media in Australia “extreme leftist”???!! Come on! They are a capitalist, Big Mining-owned, and pro-capitalist business.

I don’t believe anything from Fairfax…check the update. They have not one conservative journo left or opinion writer, they are shills for the government on climate science, just like the ABC and BBC and others. The reporting from the rest of the world by CNN and others was nothing short of scandalous with fake stories, photoshopping and omissions, particularly Saddam Hussein’s insane actions, They have failed in every facet of reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq, especially with regards to women and gays, executions and murder. Not to mention Iran’s continued threats, double dealings from Pakistan, France, China, Russia and others. These people are agenda driven, and I can see right through them. It also includes the mainstream media in the US like NYT, LAT, NBC and more.
At least Murdoch’s Fox News gives all sides to every story, like it or not. As does most News Ltd outlets like WSJournal…but all the above is not a topic that I usually blog about…but, Murdoch says that he will ‘hit hard back’.
Proof is in the ratings in the end, and Fairfax does not look too good here…

Hi, your update is from Rupert Murdoch’s Australian. Of course, if you ask a paedophile murderer whether he is guilty of the crimes he is accused of, that murderer will usually say: “Not guilty/.” So, the Australian is not an objective source.

As for ‘”reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq, especially with regards to women and gays”. Don’t you know that conservatives really hate women’s and gay’s rights?

Of course Fairfax wont print this, but you know what Fairfax say by reading the Australian…that is the difference between them. As for conservatives against women and gays? Pure projection of the left’s own failings, they were prepared for Saddam and his sons to continue on their vile ways. Just ask the women in Iraq. Oh, you can’t, Udo and his scum brother and their cronies raped then killed them. Just as the Baisji and others are doing in Iran now. Now Europe’s anti-semitism is showing through. The left’s support for Assad and Saddam and Ahmadinejad are scandalous. At least Clinton did the right thing on Kosovo.

“you know what Fairfax say by reading the Australian…that is the difference between them.”

It is a myth that the Murdoch media show both sides in controversies. The Murdoch media, like the Sun and their “quality” flagship the Times, did not even show ONE side about their very own Milly Dowler phone hacking scandal and their own similar thousands of other scandals: they showed ZERO sides, that is, they wrote NOTHING about it. Similar with their bribing of police and politicians.

You mention anti-Semitism in Europe. Indeed, the both NATO and al-Qaeda-backed Albanian nationalist Kosovo “Liberation” Army (KLA) expelled all Jews from Kosovo. The Jews which had not been killed or sent to Auschwitz by 1940s Albanian nationalists, allied to Hitler:

“It shows everything” that Murdoch’s Australian interview did not refute the content of those 14,000 e-mails. Maybe Mr Porter did not want to be interviewed by the Australian Financial Review, with the merger now underway?

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Megan McArdle asks: “How come when regular countries let people summarily execute suspected dissidents, that’s a human rights crime, but when the Palestinians do it, neither the UN nor any of the Human Rights groups can find a damn thing to say?”

scandal? Some hope. As was made clear by the Yard at the Leveson inquiry, Milly Dowler’s phone… But there was a problem – as we all now know today. The Milly Dowler story that led The Guardian on that fateful day…

that the cell phone of the murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked. The scandal led directly… is the twelfth person to be arrested over the phone hacking scandal, which was reignited in June by revelations…

that the cell phone of the murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked. The scandal led directly… is the twelfth person to be arrested over the phone hacking scandal, which was reignited in June by revelations…

schoolgirl Milly Dowler, a story that helped to force the closure of News of the World in July. “Evidence… was not responsible for the deletion of the voicemails which caused Milly Dowler’s parents to have false hope…

its 2002 interception of voicemails belonging to a missing 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was later… found murdered. Murdoch and his company paid millions to the Dowler family. The scandal has spawned…

of voicemails belonging to a missing 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. Mr Murdoch… and his company paid millions to the Dowler family. The scandal has spawned three parallel police investigations…

for the News of the World had accessed the voicemail of a missing British schoolgirl Milly Dowler… of this publication. The British scandal exploded last July when it was revealed that a private investigator working…

Your references to Murdoch media are from AUSTRALIAN Murdoch media, not from BRITISH Murdoch media, most responsible for the Milly Dowler scandal. Those 9 mentions (not the same as “10 pages”) are also very few compared to many non-Murdoch media, not just in Britain, but in continental Europe, the USA, etc. Note that Australian Murdoch media first claimed “The Guardian has made up the Milly Dowler scandal blah blah blah”; and that later Rupert Murdoch did pay for damages to the Dowler family, so he was not as innocent as his imperial media had claimed. Murdoch’s favourite Rebekah Brooks was recently arrested by (to be hoped, non-bribed) British police; accused of crimes that might, if convicted for them, bring her to prison for decades.

yes, but we were talking about the difference between Fairfax and News Ltd, Fairfax are very left in Australia and always put just a left POV… especially in areas like climate change, even to the point of actively sponsoring it. (Earth Hour)

Now your biases are really showing, projecting your own failings with name-calling, a typical left-wing occupation…so how is Obama going then? Still taking white powder that he admits in his book? Sure looks like it. I prefer to believe Murdoch’s press than anything of your political stuff…see the latest update, it’s Fairfax that has no credibility. As the saying goes, “I am Breitbart now”.

The Fix, a news site about drug addiction published by Radar magazine founder Maer Roshan, has a story about Andrew Breitbart with two sources alleging the recently deceased conservative media activist used cocaine — including Anthony Cumia of radio’s Opie and Anthony. An unnamed source told the site he did cocaine with Breitbart “as recently as last October.” Breitbart wrote in his book Righteous Indignation about using cocaine in his youth, but longtime friend Mark Ebner — a contributor to The Fix — said he stopped after college.

by Breitbart News 1 hour ago 80 post a comment
The office of the Los Angeles County coroner has completed its investigation into the death of Andrew Breitbart on March 1, and has confirmed that he died of natural causes, namely heart failure.

Chief Coroner Investigator Craig Harvey told Breitbart News that the final autopsy report would be released next week.

A press release issued by the Department of Coroner (below) notes: “No prescription or illicit drugs were detected. The blood alcohol was .04%,” a negligible amount.

The press release concludes: “No significant trauma was present and foul play is not suspected.”

My original blog post is not about Fairfax. It is about accusations of crimes against the Murdoch empire, in the context of other crimes by the Murdoch empire which we already knew about. A context which makes these new accusations more credible.

Fairfax have only just had Rinehart buy in, much to the chagrin and panic of the employees there…just wait till they put on someone like Bolt as Editor, that will shock the living daylights out of them…